More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook
The guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records. Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how much better used records could be.
Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten a mere sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45, still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)
Click on the picture to make it easier to read.
As you may have read on the site elsewhere, the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?
No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.
You must keep testing all the reissues you can find, and you must keep testing all the originals you can find.
Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of very special records. That’s why you must do them.
Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us), you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances in which you just got lucky.
In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.